A Possible Future For Mercurious?

It's been such a long time since I've been here, but the memories are already coming back. All the positive ones and the negative ones (many of which seem to have been broken promises, unfortunately). So, long time no see and I'm quite optimistic about my stay this time. Hopefully not too many of the past members here have forgotten about this place and this post won't fall on deaf ears (or blind eyes).

I should probably explain where I've been over the past year or so, but without getting into too much personal details, I'd like to assure everyone that everything in my life is in a much more organized state. I prefer to remain as a faceless entity as far as the forums and community goes however.

So what is it that I'd like to see from here and moving forward in regards to the site, the forums, and the wiki? Admittedly, and I'm sure it was apparent before, the site is a lot of straining work to update every week. And with next to no definite reward for all the work, I'd like to feel that anyone in my situation would have gotten burnt out from it. So, as much as I'd hate to give up on it, I feel the best solution would be to put our focus, as a community, into moving over to the wiki as our main gallery for our Smash Bros. ideas.

With this, anyone (with the limited knowledge it requires) can upload their ideas directly to the pages of the wiki. There would no longer be any waiting for me to type up the pages myself and upload them, you can post your ideas at your own pace. You could even be free to shape and mold the page's information and fields to include or exclude the things you feel are necessary or not needed.

Now, I'd like to keep a lot of freedom intact for members to post their ideas to the wiki, but hurdles are more than likely to show up. So if it's needed, limits to how many ideas can be posted by any single member might have to be added. Hopefully not though, so no use worrying over something that hasn't occurred yet.

The only real issue with this that I can see (and haven't really thought out as of yet), is preventing people from editing pages that belong to other members without permission. I must admit that wikis are not something that are incredibly familiar to me (and for that matter, web design really wasn't either), so if anyone is more familiar with running a wiki, please feel free to speak up. Moderators will be something we'll need to help run the wiki.

So hopefully the foundation of our community hasn't crumbled away too much, and there's still hope to rebuild ourselves and grow strong once again. In the meantime as I will wait patiently for any responses to this post, I will be on the forums posting some brand new ideas and reliving the nostalgia. Here's wishing for the best and brightest of future days ahead. Cheers!

I'm doing very well. Glad to see that atleast one person (so far) still visits these boards from time to time. Hopefully if activity here can pick up, more and more people will return before long.

The Smash games are awesome! I've been having a lot of fun playing them. I got both games on their launch dates, naturally. I got the Smash Championship belt too for pre-ordering the one, it's hanging on my wall. I've been gathering all the amiibos I can find too. Here's a list of the ones I've managed to acquire so far: Mario, Yoshi, Pikachu, Link, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Peach, Zelda, Fox, Bowser, Luigi, Samus, and Marth. I also have four more coming to me from ebay (which is where I got a lot of them), Pit, Lucario, Sonic, and Captain Falcon. I'm also anxiously awaiting the next Nintendo Direct, which I've read rumors that it's supposed to be soon, to hear what new DLC will be coming next. I'm still holding out for a few characters but my speculations are Wolf, either King K. Rool or Chibi-Robo, and either Shovel Knight, Shantae, or Rayman.

And just an update of sorts on this 'possible future' topic; after working a bit on pages for my ideas on the wiki, it honestly just didn't really feel the same to me. So I'm reconsidering the thought of working on the site again after all. I'd really like to hear the community's opinions on this.

Completely forgot about this place until today's Smash Bros. announcement, and lemme say, it's nice to know you're not dead. Although I do think it's super disappointing that the new character turned out to be Cloud: he's just another anime swordfighter. He's never even been on a Nintendo console before!

Honestly, I've never really gotten into Final Fantasy VII. The only Final Fantasy game that I've really gotten into was Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls on Game Boy Advance. But now that Cloud is coming to Smash Bros., I might just have to get into the game now.

And besides, whether you're for Cloud or against his inclusion in Smash 4, you can't deny that it's somewhat monumental that he's on his way. If Sakurai and Nintendo are able to make this happen, imagine what other characters they could obtain the rights to use. Sakurai did say that the last several characters will be fan service.

Heh, certainly been a while since I've seen signs of life around here.

A little birdy gave me the heads-up that there had been a few posts on ol' Mercurious. Hopefully I haven't missed the festivities! I brought punch and everything. I wanted to drop in and say a quick hello to everyone who might be around, for old times' sake... and, well, I'm glad to hear that things seem to be going well for you especially, DK3.

Have to say, it's neat that Mercurious is still around and kickin' in some capacity. There's something nostalgic about signing in here every now and again. A shame that the site itself isn't going to be used as the showcase for the cool ideas that come out of these forums, but I suppose a shift in focus to the Wiki can't be all that bad.

If you were to continue on with the site, my gut's reactionary first idea would be to suggest that you code a program to "automate" the process of making the submission pages somewhat -- have a program that you (and others) can just copy-paste the content of the submission into, and have it spit back to you an HTML page that can be added to the site with relative ease. Might take he burden off of you somewhat. I seem to recall that sifting through the HTML was not particularly difficult, but definitely somewhat time consuming.

With that bit said, I really am only here for a quick hello -- I don't think I really have the fuel in me these days for moveset submissions. My interests have shifted somewhat, although Smash (and consequently, Mercurious) will always have a special place in my <3. This place was, after all, the driving force behind a few Mercurious alum forming our own community (shameless plug -- you are all welcome to scope us out at ZEJ; not to make this an "us-versus-them" thing, but even if you aren't into the whole business of "roleplaying" it's always cool to have a place to hang out and talk to some strangers on the interwebs. Convening under one umbrella would be rad).

Discourse surrounding Smash is always a lot of fun. I myself am pretty amped to hear about Cloud's inclusion. I'd have preferred a different Final Fantasy representative myself (taking a leaf out of Super Smash Flash 2 and using a generic Black Mage would probably have been more 'iconic'), but Cloud is undeniably one of the most (if not the most) popular FF characters. 'Swordsman' arguments be damned! It's somewhat been made clear that Sakurai is going for fulfilling those crazy dreams of the quote-unquote "most iconic" characters putting their dukes up in the Smash Bros ring. And Cloud probably fits that bill more than anyone else.
What excites me moreso than Cloud's inclusion is the implications for the future. There were a lot of arguments against characters like Geno, for instance, that Square Enix held the rights to him "hostage," and that there still was not a good relationship between SquEnix and the Big N. I think that, more than anything, the most recent Direct proved that that is no longer the case. I've seen optimism for FF7 to be released on a Nintendo console (the NX?) -- I don't think that'll be the case. But it does bode well for potential future projects. And the implications are what make me more excited than just Cloud being a part of Smash.

Anyway, it's been nice to walk down memory lane. I'll probably post around for a bit before returning to obscurity. This place was always a fun time -- I met people I'd consider to be lifelong friends here, and I'm glad to know that it hasn't gone and given up the ghost permanently.

Wow, it's great to see that people really haven't forgotten about this place, even if I kind of showed signs that I had. It's really making me regret leaving for so long and makes me wish I had gone about it completely differently. I honestly wouldn't have guessed that my little old fan site would've done much for anyone, but it would seem it has.

I'm still on the indecisive side of whether or not to continue the site or go with the wiki. I'd hate to abandon the site all together after all the ups and downs and the memories and work that went into it. If an automated process for adding pages could be made then my mind would easily be set on revitalizing it and pressing forward, but as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm not the greatest with the web coding stuff. I pick up the basics to do what I need to do mostly from tutorial sites and searching google. I could probably modify what I used for the 'submitting feedback/rating submissions' section into something, but there would still need to be a process of filtering the poorly done submissions and spam ones out. Ideally, it'd still be nowhere near as much work to put submissions up on the site as it was before.

Something else I'd seriously love to bring back, and I'm not sure if anyone remembers this, but the Smash Bros. style text-based/turn-based sort of battles that I've attempted before. I'd love to incorporate them into the site somehow on a grander scale than before and much more refined as well. Also allowing submitters to submit their ideas to be included in this 'game' too. I think it'd bring a new level of depth to the site.

But yeah, this topic is here to discuss these things and I'd love to here more ideas from you guys.

Maybe you could try shifting Mercurious to a Tumblr, perhaps? Tumblr isn't a very hard site when it comes to making posts (Although you would have to code if you want your Tumblr to look a certain way) You could have fans submit ideas and said ideas could posted on the site. That's what I decided to do with my Smash series recently, since I wanted to focus more on posting art onto my Deviantart.

Tumblr works well as a blog, but not so much as a forum. Although, if you wanted to open the site up to purely being character movesets, having a tumblr with a submissions tag could work well. You'd have to say goodbye to those text battles, though.

Just want to give everyone an update on how things are going. Unfortunately, this site isn't a high priority for me, but rest assured, I do plan on updating it. I just don't know what kind of time frame it'd be yet. I'm working on the automated submission page idea at the moment, seeing if I can rework the rating submission section of the submissions pages into this, but I can't promise anything.

If anyone would like to take a crack at it and present it to me, it'd be a great way to help get us moving again.

Just a quick update on my status; I am still hanging around and have not left. Just reassuring everyone that my lack of very many posts (if any) over the past month is nothing more than work on the site, unfortunately, going relatively slowly at the moment.